Excuse Our Mess

The disheveled, magical chaos inherent in the writing process — and in the *business* of writing.

“I’m sorry I’m so all over the place.”

“That’s okay,” I told my newest client. “You’re supposed to be. That’s part of the creative process. You’re doing great.”

We’re on our second interview, and still trying to feel around the edges of the book together. He’s been sparking on a few key themes since we last talked, but those vibes have not yet tightened into a solid thesis statement.

But as he explains what’s lighting him up lately, I’m gathering threads. Weaving them together. Reframing them and restating them until we hit closer to the Big Idea.

It’s messy, but it’s all part of the writing process.

While most of my ghostwriting clients have written books before—in fact, many of them are highly accomplished writers—this particular client has not.

He’s brand new to the book writing process. And, what’s more, he’s not coming from a profession where writing a book is a usual way to promote your business.

Which means he’s breaking new ground in more ways than one.

It’s a very cool journey to share.

Working with new authors is a very different experience than working with an established one who comes to me with a detailed outline and a strong grasp on the writing process. One thing I learned early is that new authors don’t know a key truth more established authors take for granted:

You never know where you’re going in the beginning.

And that’s okay.

You might have a sense of your Big Idea. You might have an inkling of your audience. You might know some of the building blocks that will turn into chapters.

But no book comes into being fully formed. First, it has to go through a messy, rambly, disheveled phase.

And part of my job as a ghostwriter and book coach is to tell new clients it’s okay to come to me with messy, rambly, disheveled thoughts.

(In fact, I tell this to every client at one point or another—no matter how much they’ve written. I’m not a podcast interviewer, I’m not looking for soundbites. I’m looking for ideas, and sometimes you have to circle around those a few times they become clear. My job is to turn them into soundbites.)

In the early part of the creative process, writers are like crows, collecting shiny ideas and sparkly anecdotes and bright curiosities and piling them up. Eventually, once we have enough fascinating bits and bobs collected, we’ll sort through them and figure out what goes where, and what doesn’t belong at all.

But first, you have to gather up the chaotic magic, and you can’t gather up the magic if you don’t ramble around a bit.

In other words, like I told my client, don’t worry about it.

Trust the process.

You’re doing just fine.

I obviously can’t talk much about the topic of this book, but the cool symmetry of yesterday’s conversation is that one of its core ideas is freeing yourself from what you “should” be doing in order to let creativity—and value—flow.

This lesson applies to the writing process. It applies to the currently-under-NDA process 😉. And it applies to the business of writing.

I talk with a lot of authors, and I’ve noticed something. Whether or not you’re a pantser or a plotter, a detail-oriented spreadsheet writer or a “throw it all into Word” writer, we all go through messy phases.

Early writers often get frustrated in this phase, and spend too much energy trying to nail their story down, instead of letting life breathe into it.

But writers who’ve been at this for a bit know every story needs a certain amount of time spent shambling around the wilderness before it’s ready to come alive on the page.

We get that.

We’re comfortable with it.

We trust the process, and know we’re doing just fine.

The thing most of us are less comfortable with is the inherent messiness in the business of writing.

I sent out surveys after the Author Alchemy Summit, and a handful of people said their biggest takeaway was that they were doing okay in their business.

That startled me at first. You’re doing okay? What kind of takeaway is that?

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. In a way, I’d designed the conference to help people reach that conclusion.

Most of us writers are comfortable with the creative chaos of the writing process. But just like my new client, most of us are so worried about what we “should” be doing in our businesses that we close ourselves off to the creative chaos of the business process.

Marketing is creative. Advertising is creative. Promotion is creative. Yet we’re often so focused on what happens if we get it wrong, that we forget to let it come to life.

After all, every writer I know is running a business with a slightly different fingerprint.

You could go the trad route, shopping a book to agents and hunting for a book deal.

You could publish delightfully empowering smut under a pen name while keeping your fulfilling day job going.

You could cultivate a mix of fiction projects and client work to pay the bills.

You could write to hit an established market, or write weird off-market books that find their own odd and passionate little audiences.

You could move to the woods and publish an anonymous poetry blog.

Sure, there are some set successful business practices. But, like I talked about in my last post, there’s no real blueprint for how to be a writer.

There’s no one path that everyone needs to follow—just like there’s no one way to plot your book. Yet so many of us get hung up on whether or not we are on the right path or we’re doing the right things.

Should we be running Facebook ads? Should we be in Kindle Unlimited? Should we put our books wide? Should we sign with a publisher? Should we have gone indie? Should we write in series?

We get so hung up in the shoulds of the business and marketing that we forget to enjoy the messy inherent creativity in it all.

So whether you are writing a book, running a business, or both, my advice to you is the same that I gave to my client yesterday:

Remember that we are in the middle of a messy creative process.

Things will seem unstructured. They’ll seem unfocused.

And you might feel like you’re rambling, but that’s how you discover where you’re going.

You’re doing just fine.